An evolutionary approach for dynamic single-runway arrival sequencing and scheduling problem

摘要

Aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling is a classic problem in the air traffic control to ensure safety and order of the operations at the terminal area. Most of the related studies have formulated this problem as a static case and assume the information of all the flights is known in advance. However, the operation of the terminal area is actually a dynamic incremental process. Various kinds of uncertainties may exist during this process, which will make the scheduling decision obtained in the static environment inappropriate. In this paper, aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling problem is tackled in the form of a dynamic optimization problem. An evolutionary approach, namely dynamic sequence searching and evaluation, is proposed. The proposed approach employs an estimation of distribution algorithm and a heuristic search method to seek the optimal landing sequence of flights. Compared with other related algorithms, the proposed method performs much better on several test instances including an instance obtained from the real data of the Beijing Capital International Airport.